The Theory of Moral Sentiments – for PUPPIES!
Okay, libertarian cases for animal cruelty laws: Go! Over on Created Passionate Users Already blog, commenter Bob makes the straightforward argument that animals one owns are property, therefore it’s unconscionable to legally punish a dog owner for pretty much anything he might choose to do. This strikes me as clearly not established, but it has the advantage of simplicity. And in comments to an early Vick-case post by Skip Oliva, commenter miller888sd makes two Rothbardian/Randian arguments that strike me as, first, silly, and second, question-begging. (The first: If we grant that dogs have rights, then we can’t say bacteria don’t. This is a splendid argument once you’ve demonstrated that there’s no qualitative difference between dogs and bacteria but an asinine one until then. The second, about the relationship of moral reason and rights, is probably worth a separate post.)
Since there are slightly more versions of libertarianism than there are libertarians, I’m quite sure the two anti-arguments don’t exhaust lib perspectives on the question. Among other things, libertarians like Julian Sanchez become vegetarians for ethical reasons and libertarans like Megan McArdle go as “cruelty-free” as possible.
So, let me hear it! Arguments based on some set of rights for some set of animals; arguments based on some set of obligations toward some kinds of property; arguments that some kinds of cruelty are wrong but should not be illegal and arguments that some kinds of cruelty should indeed be matters of law; arguments that it’s appropriate for one level of government to legislate against animal cruelty but not another (e.g. state vs. federal). Requirement: explain what’s libertarian about your claims. Prohibition: Explanations of how the animal cruelty question shows how awful or at least pitiable libertarians are. I have my own somewhat gestational ideas, but I’m really interested in other perspectives. Post in comments or in your own blog with a pointer. Feel free to critique others ideas in the spirit of rigor.
Comment by Mona —
August 21, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
Dogs are capable of physical pain and emotion. They have person-like attributes.
Causing gratuitous pain to a person-like creature is wrong, and is highly predictive of a capacity to physically harm humans. Killing bacteria via antibiotics is not predictive of that, because bacteria are not person-like.
My apt last year became infested with mice. I obtained the usual poison, but it really bothered me. For my health and well-being we cannot share the place, and if I knew a better way to make them understand that and be gone, I’d have done it.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
August 21, 2007 @ 8:49 pm
libertarans like Megan McArdle
This is going to sound like snark, but it’s genuine: seriously?
She was OK with Padilla, OK with Hamdi, and thought the Administration was more protective of civil liberties than a Kerry Administration would be. Those seem like bright-line tests to me.
But I willingly acknowlege that my understanding of “libertarian” is informed by what Mill and Nozick we read in college, as well as things said by you, Julian, and other libertarian bloggers (and things pointed to by the same). I will happily take your opinion as definitive, and stop making “schmib” references about Megan, Insty, or anyone else self-labeling as libertarian. And I sincerely retract and apologize for all such previous comments.
I still think those positions are deeply and grievously wrong. But if not actually anti-libertarian, I should (and will) stop saying or implying otherwise.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 8:55 pm
We already have a lively thread for Megan McArdle’s iniquities. Let’s stick with one of those, please.
Comment by Mona —
August 21, 2007 @ 8:58 pm
I’ve never offered an opinion about Megan until Jim linked to her below. She may be on the road to sanity.
But Glenn Reynolds? I will not stop skewering him for the repulsive glibertarian that he is. Why should you?
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 8:59 pm
Come on, folks. Think of the puppies . . .
Comment by matthew hogan —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:02 pm
Animal cruelty offends rights for the reasons described, they are some sort of beings (the higher order ones) that sense pain and loss and should not be gratuitously subjected to it.
But emotional honesty time, non-animal lovers like me don’t get all ragey about it and if Vick were let off, wouldn’t worry more than 5 seconds. Am also put off by anthropomorphizers (none here to my detection) who have more anger over a dog or cat getting eviscerated by say neglect than human Arab children of the age of 5 by actions undetaken and paid for by one’s own delegated wealth and authority. And there are lots of those.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:05 pm
I haven’t thought this through, so I may not be clear on this subject. I have no full blown theory regarding this topic. But it seems to me the closer an animal is to us, the more we need to defend it, for reasons that have little to do with the animal and a lot do with us.
These thoughts tie together, I think, though I’m not yet at a point where I can tie them together forcefully:
1.) One can hope for a political order in which all humans have their basic rights respected. One can also hope for a political order in which all criminals are punished for their crimes. One could, in theory, imagine that some criminals deserve extravagant tortures, and that a civil society could justly enforce these extravagant tortures on criminals, if their crime was great enough. And yet, historically, there seems to be some connection between an intolerance for torture and a willingness to enforce people’s basic civil rights. Witch-burning and torture were common enough in Enlgand in the 1670s and 1680s yet when the revolutionary period ended, in 1688, with the passage of the Enlgish Bill Of Rights, official, state-santioned torture also ended. The death penalty endured, but burning people, gouging out their eyes, cutting off their genitals or pulling them apart with horses all largely stopped. Why?
2.) The Founding Fathers of the United States felt it necessary to forbid “cruel and unusual” punishments. Why?
3.) All over the world, reports of torture seem to come from regimes where the police are known for corruption. Why?
Is there some connection between a society’s willingness to witness the humiliating, degrading and agonizing killing of another person, and that society’s willingness to enforce basic human rights?
Let’s suppose for a moment that respect for human life informs both a willingness to defend people’s rights and an unwillingness to witness the gruesome, humiliating killing of a person.
Is there a connection between a respect for mammalian life and a willingness to defend rights for human beings?
Let’s talk about hypothetical situations, for a moment. Lets talk about a police officier. Suppose a police officier enjoys torturing and then murdering animals. Suppose this police officier owns the animals in question. Suppose the police officier perfers to torture and then kill those animals that most resemble humans – apes, for instance. Perhaps this police officier tries to track down the most intelligent bonobos he can find, then he ties them down and he takes a power drill and drills holes in their bodies. What he’s looking for is that sense of intelligent expression in their faces, the awareness that they are aware that he has power over them and is killing them.
Is such a police officier going to be an effective defender of the rights of his fellow citizens? I know that, theoretically, we can imagine an officier who compartmentalizes his emotions in such a way that he is, in fact, a great officier while on duty serving his fellow citizens. But as a practical matter, is this something we want to allow?
Comment by Mona —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:09 pm
I did! And let me further add, that one of Robert Bork’s dumber arguments against libertarianism in The Tempting of America was that libertarians supposedly have no answer to the maniac on an island who delights in torturing puppies to death; thus, the “moral pain” people feel from knowing homosexual activity and what not is occurring, ought to be respected at law just as we do not abide puppy-torture.
Puppies are affectionate creatures who feel pain. We respond to them empathetically because they are person-like, which is why we object to the maniac torturing them. We certainly ought also respond empathetically to gay human beings.
Comment by Leonard —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:10 pm
Animal rights are not a problem for anarchocapitalists. Various protection agencies will offer different corpuses of law created by a small set of judicial agencies. Among the sets of law will almost certainly be both laws reifying animal rights, and without it.
In a rich society full of dog-lovers like America, the market will shake out with a minority of places outside of laws protecting animals, and almost all decent people subject to animal cruelty laws and shunning anyone caught patronizing the other group.
That said, I’d love to see what y’all minarchists come up with. Squirm, my pretties, squirm.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:15 pm
But you’re dodging, Leonard. You aren’t making a libertarian case against animal cruelty at all. You’re simply arguing that there’s a market for animal-cruelty prohibitions that an-cap would be able to satisfy. The flipside of that is that there’s a market for animal cruelty itself that an-cap would be just as pleased to satisfy. Neither side of your coin, nor the metal between, constitutes a libertarian argument for preferring some sort of stricture against animal cruelty. In an-cap terms, that would mean an argument why people should want to choose PMCs – er, protection agencies – that enforce some set of animal cruelty prohibitions.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:19 pm
Matthew: It’s certainly the case that, beyond libertarianism, we still live in a society whose movies will show almost any variety of human mutilation and desecration, in which movies, the dog and cat ALWAYS escape unscathed.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:27 pm
Now, to keep things moving along, if I’m a libertarian who eats meat, how can I also be a libertarian who wants to jail people for drowning dogs for fun? I’m pretty sure Lawrence has already answered this. And Matt’s “gratuitously” implies an answer too. What about product-testing? What about eating dogs?
My more or less Hayekian sense is that dogs and humans have spent tens of thousands of years culturally evolving a relationship of mutual trust, and operations like Bad Newz Kennels flout that heritage. The evolution of our relationships with cattle and pigs, say, differ substantially. But even there I intuit certain obligations that some kinds of factory farming surely offend.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:28 pm
Also, let’s say Vick’s people were not gratuitous in the way they put down losing dogs, but dispassionate. Nevertheless they still run a dogfighting operation. How does the calculus change, if at all?
Comment by Leonard —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:33 pm
There is no libertarian case per se against (or for) animal cruelty. In that sense it is like abortion, euthanasia, the issue of children’s rights, and several other liminal questions that vex people that believe in natural rights.
If you believe based on moral sentiments that animals “should” in some sense have rights, then you will naturally want law, even in libertaria, to reflect that. If you believe animals don’t have rights, you won’t. Libertarians can and do differ on this basic question, just as we differ on the question of whether a fetus is a rights-bearing human. Most of us think not, based on objective criteria, but some people think that even single-celled humans have souls which mystically inhere with rights.
Libertarians do not differ substantively on the question of whether adult humans have rights, because we can each introspect and feel that we do, and tell each other about it. Animals can’t do that. A few animals may be able to introspect, but thus far they cannot tell us the results.
But back to the question, even though I do not think this is a feature of libertarianism per se, I do believe that most libertarians like the idea of devolution of power downwards. Thus, while we differ on animal cruelty, the idea that it was a Federal prosecution against Vick rubs most of us wrong. A federal law? WTF? Where is there authorization in the Constitution for dogfighting laws? I can’t find it.
If you take the logic of devolution seriously, you end up going in an anarchistic direction, or at least towards polycentric law. And that is what I was talking about.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
Fair enough, Leonard. Thanks.
Comment by Leonard —
August 21, 2007 @ 9:43 pm
Jim, my personal view is that our innate human moral sense responds to certain things, basically human-like-ness. Thus, we sense torturing animals as unjust. We will allow animal pain to serve many, probably most human ends; but the “end” of watching animals in pain strikes many people as horrible — the same moral sentiment that dislikes animal pain to begin with. Thus, torturing animals is off the table, and sports like dogfighting which are but one step removed from torture. But pretty much all other uses of animals that are not gratuitously painful are not.
That said, I don’t see this as libertarian at all. It is an intuitive human view so far as I know, shared widely across the political spectrum. What you do with it politically gets back to libertarianism, and as I said above, libertarians differ on that. Indeed, libertarians are the only people I know of where at least a few voices have been raised in defense of Vick.
Comment by Karen —
August 21, 2007 @ 10:04 pm
Okay, I’ll bite. It’s late here and I can’t sleep, so I may as well argue a point I know nothing about. That makes like about 99.7% of the people on the Internet, no?
Let me riff a bit on the example about about prohibiting torture of criminals. It’s not just that we don’t permit this because we like thugs; it’s also because allowing torture means we have to sanction some people to be legal torturers. Most humans have some level of empathy and would be traumatized by inflicting that much pain on a person, so most normal people are out of the running for this position. To get someone to do this means we have to allow a certain number of sociopaths loose in our society. I, for one, do not wish to live in a place that allows those with a demonstrated taste for inflicting agonies on their fellows, so I’m happy we don’t torture criminals.
Now, I realize libertarians don’t do the “for your own good,” for the very good reason that the worst human misery has been inflicted using exactly that slogan. Still, I think that animal cruelty is one place where that logic works. It is a documented fact that serial killers start by torturing animals. I don’t mean hunting, I mean tormenting. So, it stands to reason to me that a person who habitually inflicts pain on a sentient creature like a dog or cat wouldn’t have a hard time at all moving up to people. Thus, we prohibit animal torture in order to prevent the increase in human torture.
This is different even from meat-eating or hunting because it’s possible to kill an animal with a minimum of pain. It’s not possible to fight dogs or roosters or bait bears without causing the animals pain and terror, but it is possible to run a relatively terror-free abbatoir. Read some of the stuff that that autistic woman, Temple somebody, wrote about designing slaugterhouses that don’t frighten the animals. So I think the distinction is between a humane and quick death and prolonged and agonizing one.
I will admit it’s not a well-reasoned argument, but I’m hoping someone else will come after me and fill in where I’ve left gaping holes.
Comment by Mary Kay —
August 21, 2007 @ 10:17 pm
I don’t know if it’s libertarian or not ‘cos I am not a libertarian — I only know what I read on the blogs.
However, it is well known in criminal psychology that those who begin with torturing animals have a high likelihood of moving on to torturing and murdering human beings. If it’s against the law at least we know who to keep an eye on or where to intervene with psychological help for the future good of the polity.
MKK
Comment by Leonard —
August 21, 2007 @ 10:22 pm
Foul!
First, although it seems believable to me, is it in fact actually documented “that serial killers start by torturing animals”? All of them? Literally every one? Doubtful. Many? What percentage?
Second, even if it is true, correlation is not causation. There may be many people who torture lots of animals but never, ever, even think about “moving up” to humans. This may be because they know it is riskier. But it may be that some people’s moral senses do not include animals.
Finally, even if it is true that some tiny percentage of the population abuses some kind of property in some way, and this abuse is correlated with other kinds of criminality that we “really” care about, that is not a good enough reason to ban the abuse. As an example, consider banning tattooing under the principle that criminals are far more likely to have tattoos than the vanilla population.
Comment by Richard —
August 21, 2007 @ 10:47 pm
If we remove the gratuitous way that the losing dogs were killed, a lot of my visceral disgust with the people involved goes away, but I still come down on the side of prohibiting.
In some sense, a dog fight is like a boxing match, and I have no problem with allowing two adult humans to voluntarily decide to beat each other up/be beat up by the other for money. The problem is that the dogs don’t really have a choice in the matter, and given how they are trained, the analogy moves more towards two brainwashed adult humans fighting.
The upshot, then, is that I think dogs have sufficient rights to prohibit being induced to fight for reasons that they are biologically incapable of understanding.
Comment by Jadagul —
August 21, 2007 @ 11:11 pm
I’m opposed to animal-cruelty laws (though I’m also opposed to animal cruelty). A lot of the points I want to make have been touched on already, but I’ll see if I can pull them together.
First, I’m a libertarian for what is, in some sense, a fundamentally conservative reason: I don’t think the government should get involved unless we have clear evidence that we’ll be better off if the government does something. That is, the burden of proof should always be on the person who wants the government to take action; I’m taking the very unfair position that the burden of proof is entirely on my ‘opponents,’ on the people who think that animal cruelty laws should be passed. So I’m not going to offer ‘arguments against animal cruelty laws’ so much as ‘arguments against arguments in favor of animal cruelty laws.’
The first question is whether animals like dogs have some claim on the state that it ought to protect their rights. This is highly dependent on one’s notion of rights, so I once again can’t prove in any affirmative sense that animals lack rights. But my notion of rights is consequentialist; I think we need a system of rights because it makes everyone, on the whole, better off. And for me, ‘everyone’ refers only to people; my value system just doesn’t give any weight to the feelings of dogs. Since I’m fundamentally selfish, caring about other beings is also something that has to be actively justified. I have reasons to care about people; I have no such to care about animals.
Which brings us to the ‘nascent serial killer’ argument. And in some sense, I buy it. I think that torturing animals for fun is disgusting, and that taking pleasure in causing pain is immoral and disgusting and makes you a horrible human being. But there are lots of things that are disgusting that I don’t think the state should be involved in (hence ‘libertarian’). Also, the crime is the motive, not the action; not the causing of pain, but the taking pleasure in the fact you cause pain. The causing pain is fine as long as you have some reason other than “watching the thing squirm is fun.”
Comment by Michael —
August 21, 2007 @ 11:28 pm
So I’m not qualified to answer here (not in the club), but I do read and think about such things. I have some observations and further questions.
Is the obligation to respect the rights of others in this case owed to the dog or to other human beings?
Mona’s first reply indicates that the capacity to inflict cruelty on dogs correlates with the capacity to inflict cruelty on people, including weak or helpless people, including the old (although they deserve it for having failed to run more triathalons and/or not knowing doctors used to lie about smoking). Er, where was I? Oh, yes.
This seems to be similar to the argument that stopping drunk drivers is a good idea not because we abhor either drinking or driving, but because it correlates with killing and maiming innocent people who didn’t know that leaving The House of Pies at 2:10 AM on a Saturday was dangerous.
This seems to be the same argument that Jack Webb used to make: marijuana is bad because it leads to heroin and PCP. Anti-abortionists make a case (or shout incoherently from street corners) that abortions lead to breast cancer. I suppose I can accept this form of argument when I’m convinced the link is compelling (not tenuous or false as in the above two cases) and the second wrong is worth stopping despite the infringement of liberty required for something that is not in and of itself not a wrong. Philadelphians make a similar argument that handgun availability in Philadelphia leads to killing and maiming Philadelphians, so there’s probably an “I don’t buy it” version of this for people of every political stripe.
So, in the absence of a society to horrify with one’s thuggery, would Michael Vick have an obligation to anyone, including the dog, to not be as sadistic as he wishes to be? If he were on death row for multiple murders and his last request was to be allowed to strangle his own dog, would that be OK, since he could not pose a threat to others?
Sorry to pick on Mona (or “happy to give her a chance to expound her principles”), but this got interesting and long and I better stop it now before it bites off more than it can chew…
Comment by Kieran —
August 21, 2007 @ 11:31 pm
Okay, I’ll bite.
Off to the kennel with you, then.
Not being a philosopher or a libertarian, I prefer the sociological question, which my friend Jeremy characterizes as the narrowing pet-child gap in American society. The prevalence of concern about animal welfare is rapidly closing in on the prevalence of concern about child welfare. It would be interesting, over the next year’s run-up to the Olympics, to compare the rate of news reports about China’s human rights abuses to the rate of reports about that society’s treatment of animals.
Comment by Kevin Carson —
August 22, 2007 @ 12:00 am
As a principled basis for animal rights, a good candidate is Nozick’s side constraint to the prohibition against treating humans as means to an end: animals can be treated as means to an end, but only when there are high degrees of both necessity and proportionality between means and end, and the end itself is sufficiently important. The sheer joy of watching them tear each other apart doesn’t meet that criterion, IMO. And a new brand of cosmetics isn’t sufficient to justify a rabbit having caustic chemicals dropped in its eyes, or on its shaved skin.
On a purely visceral level, I don’t consider it any less libertarian to kick the shit out of someone torturing a cat or dog than to interfere to stop a big guy beating up on a little guy.
And anything that’s ethically permissible for an individual is permissible for voluntary associations of individuals–which means if some piece of human garbage in a libertarian society is mistreating “his” animals or kids, he should be prepared for a visit from his neighbors.
Finally, when it comes to the higher primates and other animals that demonstrate comparable levels of intelligence, I’m with Brad Spangler: they should have the same first-order rights as humans. I believe cetaceans and elephants have passed the mirror test, as well.
Comment by Ashish George —
August 22, 2007 @ 1:46 am
I think people who care about animals really labor under a disadvantage with this talk of “rights.” In essence, even the most passionate and committed advocates for animals are only talking about one right, albeit the most important one of them all: The right to be left alone.
As Julian Sanchez has pointed out before, moral consideration should be based on the cognitive properties of an organism, including but not limited to self-awareness and the ability to feel pain.
“Here’s a wacky notion: Moral status doesn’t supervene on DNA. In other words, it’s not something inscrutably wonderful about the order of human genes that makes us deserving of respect from our fellows, but our minds—the fact that we’re thinking beings, capable of desiring and loving and hating and making plans and feeling pain.”
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/108984.html
And any moral scheme should be consistent. If we grant infants basic protections, we should grant animals that have at least as much self-awareness the same protections. If we grant severely retarded children who cannot and will never be able to react to pain, communicate with others, and so forth freedom from the caprice and cruelty of more intelligent human beings, we should do the same for cows, pigs, dogs, and chickens.
If you don’t think a libertarian vision for society is irreconcilable with legal protections for human beings with only the most rudimentary cognitive properties, then you should not think it is irreconcilable with legal protections for animals with equal or greater cognitive properties.
Comment by bad Jim —
August 22, 2007 @ 2:52 am
I’m a typical meat-eating socialist and erstwhile dog owner. As a teen, on more than one occasion I retrieved my escaped German Shepherd by prying her jaws off the neck of the dog next door. On a latter occasion I waded into a pack of dogs, wielding my fists, to retrieve a friend’s dog. From this I conclude that dogs will be dogs and this Jim’s an idiot.
If you own or are owned by a dog or a cat you’re complicit in their carnivory.
So be it. The animals whose muscles I eat and with whose hides I’m shod would probably never have been born had we not an appetite for them.
Comment by Mona —
August 22, 2007 @ 7:08 am
Michael sez:
Well, I am not arguing that we should prohibit gratuitous animal cruelty because it leads to anything worse. I’m arguing that because it is known that many who delight in imposing such cruelty go on to be physically cruel (even unto killing) other humans, this indicates something about the nature of the animals these maniacs torture. Such vile people don’t get all aroused with pleasure at taking antibiotics when they have pneumonia. But a sentient puppy who can squeal in agony gets their rocks off.
Why? I submit for the same reason that people who like to torture people enjoy doings so. There is enough that the puppy has in common with a screaming human victim of torture to indicate that the puppy merits protection from gratuitous pain.
Comment by Rob —
August 22, 2007 @ 10:56 am
Really Jim? You can’t come up with a libertarian argument?
Here you go: Reading about dog torture makes you feel like somebody caused you bodily harm. If Micheal Vick came and punched you in the gut physically you’d have your property rights violated. So his torturing dogs is no different. He could of course bargain with you to have the right to make you ill, but he didn’t and assuming even small bargaining costs it would be impossible for Vick to do so. Hence make it illegal.
Of course this point to the huge problem with libertarian thought in general in that you can easily get anything prohibited based upon property rights.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 22, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
…Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 22, 2007 @ 12:56 pm
I hate cruelty to animals…but I don’t think these arguments convincingly boil down to more than “I enjoy eating beef, but I don’t get any pleasure from hurting dogs (in fact, it offends me), so killing cattle is ‘justifiable’ while torturing dogs is ‘gratuitous’.” None of us need to eat beef, and every time we do, we’re deliberately choosing to have a living, feeling mammal killed for nothing more than our enjoyment of its meat. We meat-eaters really don’t have a leg to stand on as to “good” and “bad” uses of animals, just our personal preferences …and libertarians should be inherently wary of having the state judge what “gratuitous” preferences are.
As for mutual trust, wouldn’t beef-eating be fundamentally tainted by the fact that cattle are unaware that human beings are their predators and in fact regard familiar humans as their caretakers and protectors?
I don’t see a convincing libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws. I’m happy to still oppose animal cruelty and support more humane practices in handling and killing the animals I eat because I don’t like cruelty, but I can’t justify using men-with-guns to enforce these things.
Comment by Michael —
August 22, 2007 @ 3:08 pm
Rob: Reading about dog torture makes you feel like somebody caused you bodily harm.
The huge vistas of intervention this opens are staggering. What if reading about gay marriage made you feel like somebody caused you bodily harm? It seems as if you can justify screwing around with anyone who does something you don’t like with this rule.
Comment by Wulf —
August 22, 2007 @ 5:08 pm
Of course this point to the huge problem with libertarian thought in general…
…that it has nothing to do with your example?
As Michael notes, you could justify anything with Rob’s line of thought. Try starting with an actual libertarian principle – nonaggression, for example – and it won’t come quite so easily.
As several people have hinted, and as Henley implied in the first place, we haven’t seen a convincing, non-arbitrary place to draw a line in the mushy middle. Either animal cruelty is not a matter of animal “rights”, because animals don’t have “rights”, or else those rights are not yet generally agreed upon and properly recognized. Anybody endorsing the latter needs to come up with some non-arbitrary, non-mushy proof. Remember, feeling sure about something is neither persuasive nor compelling!
Comment by Tom Maguire —
August 22, 2007 @ 5:24 pm
The huge vistas of intervention this opens are staggering.
Hmm, that is why I took his suggestion as sarcasm. Of course, the conclusion was also a tip-off:
Of course this point to the huge problem with libertarian thought in general in that you can easily get anything prohibited based upon property rights.
As to the other comments, “Why is this a Federal case” strikes me as an excellent question. At one level, the libertarian issues are the same for a state case, but still, it would be possible to move to a dog-fighting state if these were state laws.
I liked the end/means argument justifying beef-eating but prohibiting dog-fight entertainment, but I also liked the rebuttal, that the culinary experience of good beef is itself closer to entertainment than to a biological necessity. But where does McDonald’s fit in?
On the serial killer link, this site had a bit – as suspected above, there is not a 100% correlation, and in any case, correlation is not causation.
And do think about the Iditarod dog race in Alaska – folks who know nothing about dog sled racing (me!) might probably consider that to be cruel entertainment. On the other hand, the fundamental activity – using dogs to pull sleds – has a broad practical use.
Comment by Mona —
August 22, 2007 @ 5:31 pm
Actually, humans are omnivores. Yes, with a great deal of dedication, one can obtain one’s protein requirements without meat. But we are now, as a species, taller and healthier because of more meat in our diets (albeit many of consume too much of it).
But quickly and mercifully slaughtering a cow, or hunting Bambi, is different than sadistically tormenting a puppy (or cow or deer) for the “pleasure” of doing so. Even if we may morally eat meat, it is arguably immoral to cause animals gratuitous pain.
If I have cancer and am terminal, it is moral for you to give me enough barbiturates so that I may choose to take my life. You have not, however, the right to torture me to death.
Comment by Watts —
August 22, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
In my own readings about the subject of animal rights, many moons ago, I came across the philosophical concept of “moral agents” and “moral patients,” the distinguishing feature being — roughly — that an agent has a capacity to make a choice in his or her (or its) actions with regards to ethics, and a patient by and large does not — the patient isn’t a moral actor, but rather an agent’s moral choices may affect the patient. A more concrete example would be a mother as an agent and her newborn as a patient, or a person who, through some circumstance, no longer has the mental capacity to make decisions about their future. In these cases, moral agents have the responsibility for how they behave toward moral patients.
(With me so far?)
In this framework, of course, animals are moral patients. While it’s convenient to talk of animal rights, in reality we’re not talking about granting or ascribing rights to animals, we’re talking about what rights and responsibilities we have. The question in the Vick case isn’t whether the dogs had a right not be killed, it’s whether Vick had a right to kill them.
As to how libertarian this framework is, I’m not sure, although it doesn’t seem to be incompatible with a libertarian view. The classic cliche “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” is in some ways a similar proscription, after all; your right to be “left alone” is predicated on not harming others. The determining question is how far to extend “other” as a concept.
I don’t, off the top of my head, see any specific guidance on that from libertarianism, although I don’t see it from any other primarily political philosophy, either. Ashish George’s comments echo Jeremy Bentham’s long ago observation on the subject: “The question is not ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they talk?’, but rather, ‘Can they suffer?’” And I think George’s point is a fairly sound one: if you can reconcile legal protection for human moral patients with a libertarian outlook, you’ve likely already got the framework to reconcile legal protection for animals with it, too. Perhaps your right to swing your fist also ends at the dog’s nose.
Comment by Ashish George —
August 22, 2007 @ 5:46 pm
“But quickly and mercifully slaughtering a cow, or hunting Bambi, is different than sadistically tormenting a puppy (or cow or deer) for the “pleasure†of doing so. Even if we may morally eat meat, it is arguably immoral to cause animals gratuitous pain.”
But factory farms are neither quick nor merciful in their methods.
“At the Smithfield mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North Carolina, the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling, and horrible roaring. To maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the creatures are encased row after row, 400 to 500 pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates seven feet long and 22 inches wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage in stereotypical nest-building with the straw that isn’t there, or else just lie there like broken beings. The spirit of the place would be familiar to police who raided that Tennessee puppy-mill run by Stanley and Judy Johnson, only instead of 350 tortured animals, millions—and the law prohibits none of it.
Efforts to outlaw the gestation crate have been dismissed by various conservative critics as ’silly,’ ‘comical,’ ‘ridiculous.’ It doesn’t seem that way up close. The smallest scraps of human charity—a bit of maternal care, room to roam outdoors, straw to lie on—have long since been taken away as costly luxuries, and so the pigs know the feel only of concrete and metal. They lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions, or what my guide shrugged off as the routine ‘pus pockets.’”
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_05_23/cover.html
Strictly speaking, these practices might not be “gratuitous” if the goal is to maximize the production and minimize the cost of meat, and I’m sure what someone at Smithfield would say. But they are nonetheless disgraceful, and people who eat meat should, at the very least, demand more humane conditions.
Comment by Mona —
August 22, 2007 @ 8:08 pm
Ashish George: I cannot and do not argue with any of that. We humans thrive on reasonable amounts of meat. (As do many carnivorous and omnivorous animals.) But I am aware that the animal farms are often disgustingly inhumane. Nature is not kind, but we Homo sapiens attempt to civilize ourselves beyond blood in tooth and claw. I am prepared to extend that to sentient animals, tho I have not implemented such sentiments in my own life and purchasing.
Comment by neighborQ —
August 22, 2007 @ 10:02 pm
37 comments, and only #35 (Watts) comes close in his attempt to make a libertarian based case for animal cruelty laws. This would mean nothing if it were not so painfully obvious that everyone commenting actually does see the need for such laws.
Comment by Lee —
August 23, 2007 @ 10:19 am
I sometimes wonder why animals shouldn’t be considered self-owners of a sort, making our claims to own them suspect to say the least. I mean, it’s clear that many animals – certainly the higher mammals, birds, etc. – are self-directed and have their own desires and wishes that can be frustrated. The philosopher Stephen Clark, who is both a Rothbardian anarchist of a sort and an animal rightist says that a creature “owns itself if its behaviour is the product of its own desires and beliefs, if it can locate itself within the physical and social world, and alter its behaviour to take account of other creature’s lives and policies.” It’s far from clear, anyway, that there’s a big, bright line between human beings and other animals such that we’re always self-owners and animals never are. Of course, if this is right that takes us beyond simply animal cruelty laws.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
August 23, 2007 @ 11:06 am
I can’t make any claims to libertarianism, as every time I come over here and ask for an honest definition of same, I come away empty. I won’t say what libertarianism seems to be from my perspective, as however I end up putting it, it comes out disrespectful, which serves no purpose here.
My feelings on the law are, the law should not have anything to do with morality, because morality is almost entirely subjective, and generally comes down to being our own personal definition of behavior that pleases us (which we feel should be mandated for all) and behavior which offends us (which we feel should be forbidden, and punished).
When laws try to either prohibit or require behavior on the basis of some notion of right/pleasing or wrong/offensive, things always end up going badly astray. (As a side note, religion is a fabulous justification for all this, because it allows one to make use of the dialectical tool of God within one’s moral discourse. Good behavior is that which pleases God, bad behavior is that which offends God. It makes one’s pissy, provincial little certainty that heterosexual monogamy is cool, and faggotry is evil, much more palatable, at least, to those who share one’s basic belief systems.)
To my mind, legislation should attempt to define what behavior is actively anti-social, to the point where society itself will prohibit said behavior with various levels of applied sanctions when such behavior is detected and confirmed. (As a sidetrack, I’m not wild about imprisonment for lengthy periods being one of those sanctions, especially under conditions which largely amount to constant degradation and/or torture, as our current prison system seems to. I’d much rather see more minor offenses punished with community service of varying degrees of onerousness, while serious transgressions would be punished with either exile or execution. I used to be all for the Heinleinian notion of public floggings for minor offenses, as seen in STARSHIP TROOPERS and a few of his latter-life novels, but I’ve come to believe that a society tha tolerates the torture of its members for any reason is unconscionable.)
With the above in mind, the question becomes, should gratuitously cruel behavior towards lesser order beings be defined as anti-social to the point where sanctions are prescribed for it by society?
Certainly, Vick’s actions are offensive to our sensibilities as moral, civilized, rational people. Yet many moral, civilized, rational people find other things, ranging from tattoos and body piercings up through recreational use of chemicals and non-mainstream sexual behavior, to be offensive. But to offend someone, or a great many someones, meets no particular burden as to being judged anti-social, much less, anti-social to a point where sanctions must be imposed.
This is one of the mistakes that many in mainstream society make near-constantly — that if something has offended them, it has in so doing also legitimately attacked or harmed them, and not only do they as individuals have a right to respond with an attack that may or will do actual harm, but that society has a positive duty to sanction their violent response (but never the original action that offended them, thus justifying their response) but also to sanction the original offensive action in such a way as to make those it has offended ‘whole’.
Having said all that, we Americans have embraced certain lesser order beings as, effectively, ‘junior citizens’. Universally in our society, only dogs and cats meet this burden. (Many horse lovers regard horses in this way, but society as a whole feels no umbrage at horses being turned into dog and cat food. Many kids with pet rabbits would insist that rabbits are people, too, but our society does not share those feelings. We are horrified, as a society, at the thought of dogs and cats being served in Asian restaurants, for example, although in many other parts of the world, including large parts of Asia, dogs and cats have not aspired to the emotional status of honorary human beings, and are therefore regarded as legitimate foodstock.)
If Vick had been enmeshed in a surreptitious cockfighting enterprise, I suspect society’s response would have been, at best, indignation and disdain, rather than horror and outrage. And said indignation and disdain would not have been intense enough to finish Vick as a star NFL quarternback. His worth to our society as a skilled professional entertainer respected by millions would have been enough to carry him through. He would have faced minor sanctions, but a public display of contrition and a hefty fine would have ended the matter. He’d still be playing ball this season, and my Bucs would be irretrievably once more condemned to the cellar of their division (and John Gruden would probably be coaching for Miami next season, or some college somewhere).
I, personally, don’t want to be part of a society that condones or even tolerates gratuitous cruelty towards any living creature capable of feeling pain. And I do feel that sadism is degrading and spiritually corrosive to all participants, volitional or otherwise, although I will fight to the death to defend my or anyone’s else’s right to voluntarily degrade our spirits if it gets us off – that’s what civil liberties are all about, dammit.
But we will take as granted that those legally defined as adults by society can reach a state of informed consent to pretty much any condition or behavior on an individual basis (while noting my intense objection to the concept that any grouping can vote as a majority to give up all individual civil liberties for that grouping, including the minority who vote against said voluntary suspension of individual freedoms). Accepting this, we are still left with a large group of non-adult society members. Do we limit that group simply to human children, or should the law extend the lesser rights/privileges of human children to non-human orders like animals?
Obviously, certain entrenched financial interests would not want to see any sort of privileged or entitled status extended to, say, cattle, poultry, or swine. (I’ve already said Vick could have gotten away with cockfighting with far fewer sanctions against him; if he’d trained cows or pigs to battle each other to the death, would he have had similar partial immunity to social blowback?) But nobody makes any money off the slaughter of dogs and cats; in fact, many make a great deal of money out of pampering these ‘junior citizens’. Given that, are legal sanctions that protect these honorary humans objectionable? Probably not; I The real hypocrisy most likely lies in the fact that so few are willing to acknowledge that we feel such protections should only be extended to dogs and cats, and that reluctance will keep us from writing our laws to that specific extent. So we will end up with laws
I don’t know. In the end, Vick’s behavior deeply, deeply offends me, and I suspect it reflects some serious, and potentially dangerous, flaw in the man’s psyche. But I do not believe in criminalizing actions that are not egregiously anti-social, and Vick’s actions in this regard do not seem to do any notable, palpable harm to any human individuals, or to human society as a whole. The question then becomes, should higher order animals be accorded human rights, in part or all? And if we say, as we clearly want to, “well, dogs should, sure!â€, then, why just dogs? Or just dogs and cats? Why not cows, pigs, and chickens, too? Why not tuna and cod? Or snakes? Can you imagine any outcry at all if Vick had been training snakes to fight each other, and drowning the losers?
Others have argued that while animals should not be accorded the full range of civil liberties or ‘natural rights’ we accord to ourselves, they should still be accorded a primary, universal right to be left alone, or to not be gratuitously harmed. It’s comforting to think this, and I’m comfortable with it… but, still… does training an animal to kill another animal for the pleasure of human spectators arise to the level of an anti-social act so egregious that the state, or society, should interfere with it and impose sanctions against it? Only if we accept that lesser order living creatures have at least some of the same rights as human beings do. And if we do not accept this, then providing this kind of emotional status to certain animals reduces that status to a privilege, which the owner of those animals need not honor. Clearly our society as a whole does not want to accord any real level of ‘rights’ to lesser order creatures (otherwise, several billion dollar industries will have to shut their doors), and just as clearly, Michael Vick and his fellow dogbaiters do not regard the dogs they purchase for these purposes as ‘junior citizens’ or ‘honorary human beings’. (The scarier alternative is that Michael Vick and his fellow dogbaiters simply don’t care about such things and, if the law would allow it, they would happily purchase and train human children to participate in gladiatorial combats for their own gratification and amusement. But I’m not sure that’s germane to this discussion… although equally, I’m not sure it isn’t. Surely no one wants to live in a world where unwanted toddlers can be bought and raised to kill each other in arenas while depraved audiences root and bet; do we want to be part of a society where people who would do such a thing if they could, but who are forced to settle for using dogs as substitutes, walk freely and without sanction on such activities?)
In the end, I’m left with the profoundly uncomfortable conclusion that the State should damn well let Michael Vick and his fellow sociopaths buy, train, and murder all the animals they want, if that’s what they want to do. I can only console myself that I am equally uncomfortable with the idea of free speech for Illinois Neo-Nazis, too, and I’m sure that’s a civil necessity.
Having said all this, our culture does regard dogs and cats as honorary human beings, and even if there were no actual laws against animal cruelty in our culture (as there probably shouldn’t be, until we are willing to practically extend the rights those laws imply to all animals equally), I would like to think that Vick’s dogbaiting activities, once revealed, would have created such a level of opprobrium against him even among football fans that the Falcons would have been forced to fire him (or pour millions into a campaign to educate people out of their hatred of animal torturers; good luck there, fellas).
Comment by Doc Nebula —
August 23, 2007 @ 11:53 am
I apologize; there are many typoes and a few incomplete sentences in the above. I console myself with the fact that it’s much too long for anyone to bother reading through, but if you want to see a more polished version, my blogs are at abehm.blogspot.com and miserableannalsoftheearth.blogspot.com; I’ve cross-posted this to both. Thanks.
Comment by Leonard —
August 23, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
Doc, if you want a definition of libertarianism I think the wiki page is quite good.
If you want litmus tests, though, you’re going to have trouble. Libertarianism a political philosophy, and a limited one. It does not prescribe all behavior. So on things like abortion, there’s no agreement. Plus, the real world is not very libertarian and so most real-world policy you might want to test us with is going to have problems of interpretation.
I could comment more on your … um… thesis there, but no time. Just a few quick thoughts. First, I don’t think you’re correct in singling out dogs and cats as much as you do. I think most fuzzy mammals get about the same level of respect from us Americans; dogs and cats perhaps a bit more so, because they are more familiar, but not that much more.
Definitely I think we can distinguish animals by their ability to think. I am totally unconcerned with the pain that insects may feel, other than the possibility that a human being believes in it; to me they are biological robots. Dogs are different: their pain matter on account of them, as well as us. Chickens sit in between.
I also think you are not fully appreciating the matter of types of use of animals. So long as animal pain is hidden from us, we don’t worry too much about it. True enough. However, I don’t think that is really any different than human pain. It’s just that humans are so much better at reporting pain afterwards. But to the extent that pain happens and we never know about it, I think we are generally much more tolerant.
But this is one reason we distiguish pitting animals against each other in fights, and killing them for food. I don’t care what kind of animal is used to stage fights with, people are going to hate it because the pain is inescapably part of the spectacle. If Vick et al were staging fights with horses or pigs, and then brutally killing the losers in painful ways, people would be just as horrified.
On the other hand, when I buy a nice juicy steak at the store, I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know for certain any details about the suffering caused to its originating cow, even though I have very good reason to think there was at least some, and probably a fair amount. But the pain is not necessarily a part of the product.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 2:25 pm
Healthy vegan diets are hard, but more lenient vegetarian diets that allow dairy and egg consumption aren’t particularly inconvenient. In the context of “good reasons to hurt or kill animals”, “But I don’t like beans!” doesn’t sound any less gratuitous than “Mmm, steak!”.
That may be, but I thought we weren’t talking about personal moral reactions, but whether the state should punish people for doing some unkind things to animals and not others?
I don’t. I see and completely sympathize with the desire for such laws, but I have to admit that I can’t see any justification.
Ehn, console yourself that any actual libertarians most like rolled their eyes and skipped past after your first paragraph.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 23, 2007 @ 2:29 pm
Leonard jogs me about something that hit me overnight: Doctrine of Double Effect. Animal suffering at human hands. Discuss.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
If animals are moral agents, cattle are our victims by most definitions (since, out of an arrangement we enforce, the cattle suffer the ills and we get the good results), and I don’t think the doctrine of double effect covers victimization.
Comment by Mona —
August 23, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
We are indeed. And I think the person-like attributes of various animals — certainly many mammals — means they have some limited rights claims. At a minimum, they have a right to be free of gratuitous pain that is inflicted for no other reason than to “entertain” a human.
Comment by Mona —
August 23, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
Thought experiment: What if we found a tribe of Homo erectus in a rain forest? They are not us, but damn close. Do they have a right to life and to be free of gratuitous torture? I say they do. Other mammals may not have as many rights, but the more sentient and person-like they are, the more rights we should recognize.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
But they don’t have the right not to be confined and killed (along with some unavoidable attendant suffering even using humane methods) just because I want a steak?
No offense, but I don’t think that gets beyond “animals have rights as long as they don’t get in the way of my preferred uses for them” in any meaningful way.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
But would you say we have the right to eat them if Homo erectus meat turned out to be tasty, Mona?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 4:10 pm
Beyond the teasing, I do agree with your basic premise, Mona, and I don’t see rights as an entirely all-or-nothing thing for intelligent animals. For instance, if the hypothetical Homo erectus tested as far below Homo sapiens mental ability as paleontologists consider them to have been, I wouldn’t say they must have voting rights. I’d even say there’d be fair justification to, say, confine them to their current habitat for their protection.
However, I would say they’d have the hard, broad right to not be be exploited by humanity, not coerced into the service of human beings, whether that entailed our enslaving them, sticking them in zoos, eating them, making clothing out of them, or just tormenting them.
Saying that cattle have rights, but that those rights just don’t happen to protect against the uses we generally make of cattle strikes me as suspect. If animals have rights, I would somehow suspect that to require us to treat them differently than under a legal regime where they don’t, and for that difference to go far beyond raising them under better conditions and killing them cleanly.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
August 23, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
Leonard,
I’m pretty sure few if any ‘fuzzy mammals’ besides dogs and cats get the ‘junior citizen/honorary human being’ status that dogs and cats get. As I may or may not have said in my frickin’ novel, above, nobody buries a horse in a grave in the backyard and puts a little popsicle stick cross up as a marker, nor does anyone much object when Flicka ends up as dog chow. On the other hand, if someone launched a scheme to turn dead cats and dogs into horse feed, I suspect there would be national outrage.
As I understand it, we outlaw animal combat in this country largely because, well, we want to… on some level, it offends us (the mainstream, anyway) emotionally, the same way that prostitution and recreational drug use does. If a justification is needed, though, we have become sophisticated enough to skip over “well, I don’t think people should be allowed to enjoy gladiatorial combats to the death” (which we don’t, for the most part) and go to “Oh, it’s cruel to the animals!”
But I think what we’re examining here is whether or not that particular rationale is a valid one under libertarian standards. I can’t seem to get a straight answer as to what libertarian standards ARE (Mr. Henley seems to assume everybody ‘just knows’) so I went to great length to explain what MY standards are. If they accord with libertarian standards, that’s great. If not, okay to that, too.
Eric,
I console myself with the fact that where others wouldn’t bother to read my responses, you most likely couldn’t even if you wanted to.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 5:13 pm
By all means, whatever gets you through the night.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
You have the internet at your disposal, and at least one patient person has pointed you to the Wikipedia article on libertarianism. There’s not much obligation that people talking about a subject have to explain the basics of it to someone who walks up and demands a primer, whether that’s libertarianism, liberalism, engine repair, or library science….and it’s even smaller when the guy walks up and says, “I don’t know what yer about, but I think I’m agin’ it!”
Comment by Doc Nebula —
August 23, 2007 @ 6:24 pm
Haffabee,
I personally feel we all have an obligation to educate and enlighten where possible — certainly, it’s one of the ways we can pay for the privilege of free blogging, should we choose to do so — but if libertarianism also equates to intellectual laziness, well, color me shocked and let’s move on.
Personally, though, I’d be more inclined to believe that intellectual laziness, as well as sheer pigheaded arrogance, are more your metier than libertarianism’s. But I could be wrong there, too.
While I’m not going to assume that someone like Mr. Henley, Mr. Thoreau, or Ms. Mona doesn’t bother to explain their guiding philosophy because they’re actually incapable of doing so, I’m certainly willing to reach that conclusion about you, sir.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 23, 2007 @ 6:47 pm
Nebbish,
Be my guest.
It seems only fair, since I’ve come to conclusions about you.
I’m afraid I don’t have time to feed you further, though. Have a nice night!
Comment by Hugo Pottisch —
August 23, 2007 @ 7:32 pm
I see.. as long as we allow slavery blacks are merely property and therefore…
this is cyclical logic, ie rubbish… it was this kind of “thinking” that has created factory farms while still perceiving ourselves as the “heroes” whenever we watch a Hollywood film..
vital-lies, self-delusion.. we are the über-race… we own the planet and the animals and the… slaves.
REPEAT AFTER ME: slaves are property and you do not touch property rights as a libertarian…
wow – those “libertarians” who value slavery more than freedom are indeed a strange kind.. what makes them so different than ANYBODY else who thinks that he or she would not abuse power like a Dictator? If you cannot stop now with those who are your mercy now and who cannot move their entire lives.. why are you to think that… Dad – please pay for my nose job and I will happy for ever.. take care of all the humans in need and stop all the wars and then maybe.. animals.. ha! get real…
Prost to you too, über-mensch… freedom for economy but not for ecology.. cause we could survive under Stalin – but we could not survive without nature.. who cares – back to our numbing pleasures..
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
August 23, 2007 @ 7:34 pm
The question of rights is a question of line-drawing. You can take the notion that no one of any species has any rights, but that’s not a particularly compelling idea. You could alternatively take the notion that the swatted mosquito deserved the whole rights we accord to humans. That, too, is not a particularly compelling or sensible idea. So, the line gets drawn in the middle somewhere. And Leonard is right: libertarianism doesn’t answer the question of where that line gets drawn, or if there are gradients between algae and human. Libertarianism is a modest political philosophy.
Like any other decent person, I find the dog fighting repellent. But I can’t justify using violence against a person who stages dogfights. Dogs are wonderful creatures, but they are not humans, and their pain, sorrows, sufferings, etc. don’t matter as much as the pleasure and pain of humans. That a human should be locked in a cage for being mean to a dog strikes me as unjust, however ugly that treatment might have been.
Comment by Madeline F —
August 23, 2007 @ 9:08 pm
Doc Nebula — take comfort in the fact that his every response makes his following responses worth less and less!
As for animal cruelty, I’d imagine the libertarian answer would be “Make no law, if it’s gruesome enough, it will sell news, and then people will know not to do business with the torturer.”
However, libertarians are already fine with giving different humans different rights. So extending some rights to other animals fits right in.
Trackback by The Agitator —
August 23, 2007 @ 10:09 pm
What Gene Said…
Jim Henley asks for libertarian positions on animal rights. As I’ve written here before, my take is similar to Gene……
Comment by Leonard —
August 23, 2007 @ 10:54 pm
Doc, the reason I pointed you offsite then and now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
… rather than lecturing to you, is that this thread is not about defining libertarianism. If Jim wants to do that, he can. But it’s rather OT here. And it’s not that hard to find plenty of info online about libertarianism.
But for this purpose, I suppose I can cut it down to a caricature: libertarian “standards” on what the law should be require that the law only vindicate rights, and that rights themselves can only be “negative” rights. This is why Jim is wondering about animal rights. If they don’t have ‘em, most libertarians consider them property with all that follows from it. Read Mr. Pottisch above for a taste of all the inarticulate horror that such a thing instills in some liberals. A dog is a rat is a boy is a black person in slavery!
Incidentally anarchocapitalists don’t have the same problem y’all natural rightsists do, because we do not attempt to reify rights within the system. As I argued above. Of course, this only pushes the problem back a level (as Jim reminded me), but I think that pushing it back on each individual and then aggregating them as much as they are willing is as good as we can do.
Doc, as for your specific points in #51, I disagree with many of the feelings you have about hypotheticals. For example, on turning dead pets into horse feed. I’ve had several dogs killed (”put to sleep”). In each case, I did not keep the body (although I could have); instead I basically had them send it to an incinerator. I think. Might have been mass grave. Point is, I have no fetish over bodies, and I would have been happy to have it actually do some good in the world. If I could have given it to a company that would render it into animal food, I would have.
Another is, I do certainly believe that many people are as attached to horses and other animals that are much rarer than dogs. This is not a mass phenom, but that’s because most people don’t own horses. I’d be surprised if there were not a lot of horses buried very respectfully.
I agree that people are much less respectful about some other critters, like mice and rats and bunnies, but this is because these creatures are a lot less brainy than cats and dogs. But it is exactly their braininess which is the criteria, if any is, for us refraining from causing them pain.
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
August 23, 2007 @ 11:44 pm
Incidentally anarchocapitalists don’t have the same problem y’all natural rightsists do, because we do not attempt to reify rights within the system.
Not entirely true. For the natural rights anarchists like me, the system itself is the first step in the reification of rights.
Comment by Ashish George —
August 23, 2007 @ 11:53 pm
If you click Radley Balko’s link above to his post at Theagitator.com, he argues for a federalist solution. I think this is a terrible idea.
If you think factory farming–or to use another example Balko invokes, abortion–involves serious moral wrongs that are qualitatively different from the moral wrongs involved in, say, bad tax policy, then why wouldn’t you want it to be heavily regulated or banned everywhere instead of having it prohibited in some places and concentrated in others? In other words, if an issue like this registers as of a certain seriousness or as a matter of an urgent moral obligation we have to fulfill, then how can we turn a blind eye to what our fellow citizens in other parts of the country do? The link I provided in my last post described a horrendous factory farm in North Carolina operated by Smithfield. Federalism would result in the preservation of the status quo at sites like that in North Carolina and other states where influential corporations and lobbyists would prevent any significant state regulation of meat packing business practices.
I’ll re-state the question I posed earlier for Mr. Balko and others who sympathize with his position: If you think government intervention at the national level on behalf of human beings with only the most rudimentary cognitive properties (infants, the severely retarded, etc.) is all right, then why wouldn’t you think national action on behalf of animals with comparable or greater cognitive properties would be justified?
Comment by The other Eric —
August 24, 2007 @ 8:03 am
Several people in this thread have proposed a rule that one may use or even kill animals, but one may not torture them.
This is not without precedent. In war, you can shoot enemy soldiers, but (under the Geneva conventions) you may not torture them.
This seems like a sensible philosophy, if not necessarily a libertarian one[1]: Torture is forbidden, across the board.
This does have unpleasant implications for modern Americans. It suggests that we need to shut down the factory farms, and treat our food animals with a modicum of respect.
But really, I’m OK that a discussion of morality might require me to change my behavior. Otherwise, what’s the point?
[1] Many self-declared libertarians apparently believe that torture is OK as long as you do it in “self-defense”, to promote an abstract goal of “freedom”, or as part of a “clash of civilizations.” I don’t assume that these people are representative of libertarianism as a whole. But they clearly exist in significant numbers, even among people who used to be fairly ordinary libertarians.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
August 24, 2007 @ 8:59 am
Madeline,
Thanks. I do take comfort in that. As to the “there shouldn’t be animal cruelty laws, there should just be publicity, so society can then shun the perpetrator”, I tend to agree with that, as I’ve stated over at my own blogs. I think there’s a problem, though, with elite celebrity types like Vick. OJ Simpson still seems to lead a pretty good life, with no shortage of sycophants to kiss his ass and stroke his johnson, and apparently he somehow has enough income to maintain a very luxurious lifestyle… and OJ is one of the most universally hated people I know. I suspect, if we leave it up to society to punish ill behaving celebrities through social sanctions, little justice will be done.
Yet, on the other hand, I just can’t see locking someone up for treating his own property however he likes. If animals are to be more than property, then someone needs to tell Colonel Sanders. Until then, odious though I find Vick’s actions, I can’t see where they should be illegal.
Leonard,
Hey, I don’t care what they do with my body when I’m no longer living in it… although I suspect my enlightenment may well lapse should the body at issue belong to my mother, wife, or child, so I suppose I’m really not all THAT evolved. Nonetheless, I still think dogs and cats get special status in American eyes that is not accorded to other ‘fuzzy mammals’.
On the general intelligence of horses — somebody once noted that horses are the only animal stupid enough to let a human work them to death. Me, I think horses are pretty, but in my experience, they’re awfully stupid. Cows are ugly and smelly and not much brighter than horses, but they are MUCH more useful… but nobody romanticizes cows. And, I believe, once a horse is dead, few if any romanticize it any further.
I appreciate your pointing me to the wiki page on libertarianism. However, it tells me that there are two main types of libertarians, rights theorists and consequentialists. Without Mr. Henley advising me which kind of libertarian he is, I cannot be sure what kind of anti-animal cruelty arguments he is looking for. This is why I ask for enlightenment on these things (a request that always seems to me to be entirely reasonable) and, prior to your most recent response, am always either ignored or sneered at for it. Which tends to make me feel poorly inclined towards libertarians. It’s not that they have a corner on Internet rudeness, but I will say, the philosophy seems to attract nearly as much arrogance as conservative Republicanism.
Anyway, I do appreciate you taking the time to read my entirely too long winded posts and respond to them so articulately and lucidly.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 24, 2007 @ 9:10 am
Doc, I thought I was pretty clear in the post itself – because libertarianism is a bundle of many strands, I’m eager to hear plural arguments based on whichever strand a given commenter clutches. I think “natural rights OR consequentialist” only begins to describe the varieties of libertarian philosophy, politics and temperament, btw.
Comment by Philos —
August 24, 2007 @ 9:36 am
Eric said: “Healthy vegan diets are hard…”
I didn’t find it difficult. Eating vegan just takes time to adjust, both physically and mentally. After all, the body is ridding itself of all those toxins. Like most changes in our lives it takes an initial investment of time to get started –reading labels, learning new recipes, and finding new sources for healthy meals in and out of the house. But after the initial time investment, it becomes second nature to shop, cook, and eat vegan.
But here’s some additional motivation for those who aren’t quite convinced.
The American Dietetic Association says at their website:
“Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber,magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and
E and phytochemicals. Vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass
indices than nonvegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”
Dr. Frank Oski, former director of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University said:
“There is no reason to drink cow’s milk at any time in your life. It was designed for calves, it was not designed for humans, and we should all stop drinking it today, this afternoon.”
Dr. Spock agreed, saying, “[T]here was a time when cow’s milk was considered very desirable. But research, along with clinical experience, has forced doctors and nutritionists to rethink this recommendation.”
And finally, The World Health Organization (WHO) says that western
nations that consume a lot of meat/dairy have the highest levels of osteoporosis, which is caused by eating a lot of animal protein and that “…hip fracture rates are higher in developed countries where calcium intake is high than in developing countries where calcium intake is low…fracture risk has recently been shown to be a function of protein intake in North American women.”
There are compelling health, environmental, and ethical reasons to eat vegan.
Comment by Philos —
August 24, 2007 @ 9:39 am
Rationality or reciprocity cannot be _necessary_ conditions for rights. These traits may be _sufficient_ conditions, but that leaves the door wide open for animals, because other sufficient conditions exist that include the animals –along with the babies and mentally handicapped. Animals have rights for the same reason that babies and the mentally handicapped do.
Comment by Philos —
August 24, 2007 @ 9:48 am
Is it natural to eat meat? Who cares? It’s natural to want more salt, sugar and fat than is good for us, because these things were scarce in our ancestral environments. If you’re talking about how our ancestors lived, crowding animals into factory farms and growing turkeys who cannot walk because they are so top-heavy is definitely not natural. And because of their deformed size, turkeys can no longer reproduce “naturally” and must ALL be artificially inseminated. That is certainly NOT “natural.”
It’s “natural” for males to want to impregnate as many females as possible to assure their genes carry into the next generation. But I don’t think anyone would suggest that males should be promiscuous because it is “natural”.
What we _should_ be concerned about is what’s actually good for us individually for our fellow human beings, and for the other creatures with whom we share this world. Once we’ve got an answer to that question, who cares about natural or unnatural?
Comment by Leonard —
August 24, 2007 @ 10:00 am
Well, I don’t want Federal standards for the treatment of infants and the severely retarded, either. But I take your meaning: if I think X, why shouldn’t I want X to be universalized, and enforced against all humans?
There are two reasons, one philosophical, the other practical.
(1) Because I am humble, and willing to take the opinions of other people seriously, even though I disagree with them (sometimes strongly). In short: because I am tolerant. I am not talking about the new meaning of tolerance (”acceptance”), but the older one.
(2) Because I realize that enforcing my will on other people is itself potentially morally objectionable, as well as costly. Let me note that the same argument you are trying to make against Federalism works just as well against any devolution of political power anywhere, worldwide. So, to the extent that you take the idea seriously, you should want abortion and animal rights standards not just for North Carolina but also for Poland, Chile, China, and Iraq. Needless to say, enforcing your will in all these places may be costly. And as the example of Iraq shows, that cost is not just to you, but also to them. Why can’t they just give up their ignorant ideas (Islam and such), and become good, clean, peaceful Americans?
Comment by Philos —
August 24, 2007 @ 11:04 am
Leonard said:
“…enforcing my will on other people is itself potentially morally objectionable, as well as costly.”
Society (including Libertarians) “force” their “wills” on others every day when they pass laws against murdering, stealing, raping, polluting, and we incarcerate and punish people for breaking these laws.
To take the idea that we shouldn’t force our wills on others seriously, you’d have to say that putting thieves and rapists in jail or ostracizing liars from your circle of friends is “forcing others”, which of course is silly:-)
Most people accept that some things are –objectively –morally wrong and that it is perfectly proper for society (and individuals) to “force” this morality on others.
Breeding and slaughtering animals is a moral issue in the same way that these other issues are all moral issues. It is not simply a matter of personal preference left “to each his own” as if it were simply a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice-cream, or a personal preference for tennis over skiing.
Furthermore, few people would suggest that because it is costly to pass and enforce laws against murder, rape, robbery, etc., that society should not bear the costs.
If it is established that animals have rights, then the cost of enforcing their rights is no different or more costly than enforcing any other law.
Trackback by Overlawyered —
August 24, 2007 @ 11:11 am
Open thread: question for discussion…
Paging Professor Volokh, Ronald Bailey, and other libertarian bloggers: On what principled grounds can one distinguish between a ban on foie gras and a ban on dogfighting? If one accepts limits on the libertarian principle……
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 11:48 am
That would be my response. I find dog-fighting repulsive enough that I’m ambivalent about the idea of Vicks going to jail, even if I intellectually think he shouldn’t. On the other hand, I have no problem with him never playing pro sports or getting an endorsement deal ever again, which will almost certainly happn.
Not sure where you’re pulling this from; one problem I personally have with animal rights is that I suspect they could undermine human rights.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 11:55 am
You can shoot enemy soldiers who are engaged in military operations against you, but you can’t deliberately slaughter a village full of innocent civilians or summarily execute POWs not trying to escape, even if you think they would make great barbecue. Nor can you bring the captives back home, breed them, raise their children in captivity, and eat them.
The analogy is too strained to provide precedent.
Fundamentally, I don’t think we’re talking about someone or something having “rights” if there’s no moral and legal onus against killing that person or thing for your own gain, no matter whether that gain is in a socially acceptable form or not. If you don’t have that fundamental right, you don’t have any rights worth speaking of.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 11:58 am
No offense intended. It’s just that some do find it hard, which is why I stipulated that for the sake of discussion. Non-vegan vegetarianism seems to be an easier adjustment and more easily maintained lifestyle for most people who go into that.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 12:04 pm
Or, for anyone balking at analogizing to cannibalism, you can’t go around shooting civilians of a hostile country so you can take their belongings…
Comment by Leonard —
August 24, 2007 @ 1:03 pm
The right not to be tortured is worth speaking of. And in fact it is what we are speaking of in this thread. There’s a good reason for that: animals cannot fear death, at least not in the sense that we do. They do not plan their future; they live in the present. They can’t fear torture, either; but they can experience it. Which is what this is all about.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 24, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
Some animals certainly can fear torture, which is why it’s so hard to rehabilitate abused dogs. Of course, animals can fear death too, which is why even in my neighborhood the deer keep a respectful distance. In “neighborhoods” where people can discharge long guns, the respectful distance is commensurately greater.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
As Jim says, animals fear death all the time. Snowshoe rabbit fleeing a wolf? Scared.
Cattle are just relaxed (most of the time) because they don’t know that this “animal husbandry” thing leads up to the same fate.
Comment by Philos —
August 24, 2007 @ 7:23 pm
On veganism Eric said: “It’s just that some do find it hard…Non-vegan vegetarianism seems to be an easier adjustment and more easily maintained lifestyle for most people who go into that.”
I guess my point was that it’s all takes time to adjust and find menus that are just as good as what you’ve been eating. And it’s mostly what you’re accustomed to.
On the advice of their doctor, my parents decided to switch from whole milk to 2% milk. The first two weeks they whined about the thinness of the 2% milk. But after about 2 months, they drank whole milk when visiting friends and they couldn’t believe how thick and unpalatable it tasted to them after getting used to the 2% milk. Same with switching from real butter to diet oleo.
My recent experience with pizza is a great example. As a vegan, I haven’t had cheese for many years and I thought I missed mozzarella on pizza and lasagna(I don’t buy the processed faux soy cheese either).
But we ordered a vegan pizza last week as we often do, but when it was delivered it had cheese on it. We sent it back and they delievered our vegan pizza about 45 minutes later. The delivery man gave us the cheese pizza and said “keep it, we can’t take it back.”
For a moment I thought, Ah, guilt-free cheese pizza…:-) It’s not saving any animals if we throw it away. We both took a slice of the vegan pizza and a slice of the cheese pizza. When we tasted it, we were disgusted…it tasted like rotten milk curds. It was surprising to discover that we really didn’t like the way it tasted. I think it really is all a matter of what you’re used to.
I think I read about 40% of the world’s population is vegetarian (Indians for example)? They certainly don’t miss eating meat and probably don’t even like the way it tastes.
But I agree that vegetarianism is a better place to start and after a while it’s easier to eliminate the dairy products as well.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 11:39 pm
I’m not clear on how strictly vegetarian most Indians are; the ones I know are willing to eat chicken.
Comment by Peter Risdon —
August 25, 2007 @ 10:18 am
Whether there’s a libertarian argument for a certain approach to animals depends on what your arguments are for being libertarian. Objectivists have a predisposition to regards animals as property (at best) because this was Rand’s view. I don’t share it.
I call myself lib because I think our innate quality is autonomy. I don’t have a right to free speech – or indeed anything else – I’m autonomous and can do and say what I damn well please.
But because I don’t live in isolation, I accept some responsibilities towards others, especially in respect of guaranteeing as much of our respective autonomy as possible.
The questions are: who are those “others” and what responsibilities do I accept?
I include some other species in the word “others”, on a sliding scale, because I think that a rational view of the world based on current understanding, especially of evolutionary theory, makes that inescapable.
Dogs and humans have coexisted for millennia, perhaps even coevolved. I accept that my relationship with my dogs includes an obligation to respect their autonomy to the degree of ensuring they get out on walks with me, because I’m responsible for trapping them in a building the rest of the time and they can’t take themselves out because I don’t let them, and of course it extends to ensuring I don’t cause them suffering.
Because I’m depriving them of their autonomy in the first place (something early dog owners probably didn’t do), a breach of these responsibilities towards them would be as grievous as a breach of my responsibilities towards other dependent and powerless individuals, like children or the mentally disabled.
We live in a world, perhaps a universe, in which evolution is driven by predation. This isn’t a necessary evil, it’s a necessary good – species couldn’t adapt quickly enough without the engine of predation accellerating natural selection. Without it, higher life wouldn’t exist.
But I accept a responsibility to respect the autonomy of the animals I eat. So I prefer wild meat, and I won’t eat factory farmed meat, where the animals had their autonomy entirely denied to them.
Comment by strange but true —
September 10, 2007 @ 12:35 pm
Let me get this right: You’re arguing that people should have the right to be cruel to their animals… So, when your next door neighbour festoons his garden with animals in various stages of distress – you think he’s right?
Do you have kids?
If he has kids are they his property as well?
Grow up.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 10, 2007 @ 12:38 pm
Gideon, it would help if we knew just which commenter you’re addressing.